i bought a volca keys hoping to use my minibrute as a controller. quickly learned that won't work, so i'm looking into a midi controller... but i've heard people complain about a volume drop when using a controller with the volca keys; similar voltage stuff that made me have to SLAM on the minibrute keys to get anything close to full volume out of the volca.

can anyone recommend a barebones controller that works flawlessly with the volca keys? if there are issues across the board i may return the volca and try for something else polyphonic and inexpensive... cannot hang with that built-in "keyboard..."

It sounds like the inbuilt Volca keyboard is always outputting close to maximum 127 MIDI velocity. So when using a typical velocity-sensitive external keyboard, you're not usually getting full volume.

Set your external MIDI keyboard to output full velocity all the time and see if that fixes it. Then if you still want some velocity control, use a keyboard which can be set to low touch sensitivity - then you'll have to press less hard to get louder MIDI volumes.

lol @ how this topic is right on the money with what I just did! -->last night, I played with my Minibrute and Volca Keys for the first time, using the CV for clock timing and MIDI for external keyboard. It all worked OK to me - although I am using an Akai MPK25 via Ableton Live 9 as the master clock source.

Here's the concept recording I made - (this is raw, unedited and concept only - full of bad key presses and mistakes):

the keyboard on the volca plays all octaves as it should.
the pitch on the icon does work, so its sending data but it does not get the pitch data of the volca...i got it from ebay today and reseted it to fact settings...mh any idea?